Overview

We created the Kiva API so that anyone with a good idea and some software savvy can help us expand the reach of Kiva, taking it into new environments and to new audiences, and creating new features for the Kiva community to experience our content in new ways. True to the name of our developer destination, we want you to help us build Kiva.org.

We set out to create the simplest API possible; what we came up with was a set of RESTful web-services. In fact, ever since we introduced RSS feeds a few years ago, many of you in the community have been asking for exactly this. This first version of the API is a humble offering, mainly concerned with various ways to fetch Kiva data. This is an important building block for some of the functionality you'll see us release down the road.

The documentation section of the site is a manual of sorts for working with the API. We talk about conventions and best practices, and introduce you to some of the various data objects and how to work with them. We recommend that you read through most of the sections before embarking on your first application. If you are looking for API specifics, you'll want to check out the API Reference.